


The Moment She Said It

by Schonste (Churchwarden)



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Episode Related, M/M, Male-Female Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-12
Updated: 2011-01-12
Packaged: 2017-10-14 16:50:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/151411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Churchwarden/pseuds/Schonste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During Starship Down, Julian and Jadzia get stuck in a tiny room sealed off without life support. Julian has two moments of realization that change his thoughts on his relationships to his friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Moment She Said It

**Author's Note:**

> Episode based, Starship Down. Prompt: Moment.

Julian Bashir’s arms are wrapped protectively around the surprisingly broad shoulders of Lt. Commander Jadzia Dax. The deck has been sealed off. The air supply has been steadily being sucked up by their own panicky breaths, the heat is being sapped slowly out into the emptiness of space. And finally, after a shivered conversation and a soft, desperate laugh, Julian Bashir finally realizes what he means to Jadzia Dax – but he doesn’t understand why.

He can smell her; the natural, earthy scent of her Trill skin, her soft hair. She doesn’t use perfume unless she’s going out. Bashir knows all her favorite scents. He’s helped her pick a few out. He can’t smell any of them now.

He thinks of their relationship early on. He’s reluctant to think of it as a friendship. For Bashir, Dax had always been his prey. It had been playful, obviously, but his intent was clear. How could he help it? Dax was clearly the most beautiful, intelligent creature to grace his very presence, but she barely noticed him. And now, that she had just admitted his attentions earlier on had been the reason their relationship had grown the way it had, he knew he had been destined to be her friend for a lot longer than his ego had guessed previously.

He thinks of her as he feels the goosebumps practically pucker on his skin as the temperature drops. Their friendship had been solidified easily after the first year of his being placed there. The only person who had seen him as often as she had, since then, had been his strangely untrustworthy lunch companion, plain and simple Garak.

With his eyes shut, he feels the corners of his mouth barely twitching into a grin before it twists into a grimace. He squeezes his friend closer, the long line of where their bodies touched the only heat he could get, and he knows their bodies are getting colder rapidly. He thinks of the warmth of bodies, the strange heat of rough skin, a quivering, amused stretching of gray lips.

How has his mind gone to this place, with Jadzia Dax trembling for life in his arms? When his eyes snap open for a few blinks, he sees the grays of the walls, and then his eyes focus back on her. The low light and their surroundings make her seem much less pink. Her lips are practically blue from the cold. He can’t help it when he presses a protective, chaste kiss to her forehead.

Her voice quakes. “W-what was that f-for?” There’s a curiosity in her voice that he can place easily. His arms tighten around her and he says nothing at first. They haven’t spoken since she last threatened him about his flirting and he’s not sure what of what he has been thinking about would be proper to bring up.

Her breathing is slow, but each inhale is sharp. Their oxygen is thinning out. “Julian. You’re one of my closest friends,” she whispers. “I’m g-glad you threw yourself onto the d-deck. T-to save me.”

“Jadzia,” he whispers, his chest beginning to ache with more than just pressure from lack of air. “I need you t-to know,” and he clears his throat, trying to stop the shivering from cold so his words would sound strong. “About…my feelings. About us.”

What comes out of Jadzia’s mouth nearly causes Julian to die of shock. “I know why you do it,” she says, and he tries to interrupt her, but her cold, slender fingers touch his lips. Little does he know, his are practically the same color as hers, now. “Why you chase after every woman. Why you chased me until you didn’t have it in you anymore.” Her words roll out of her fast and logical, and his dark eyebrows are furrowing. “You are king of the compensation, Julian. No one else knows, I swear. Well, maybe Odo. You know how he can be.”

“Jadzia.” Julian’s voice feels small. “What are you talking about?” He hasn’t even professed his undying love for her, and those gray—or rather, blue, lips.

“I understand,” she says, and one of her arms comes around to wrap around his waist, and a new line of heat is formed as their bodies touch. “Why do you think I wanted you to come with me on that dinner date, with Lenara? You of all people would be able to understand my attraction to her, even outside of the…the connection we shared through our symbiants.”

Julian feels like he must have begun to hallucinate from the cold, the lack of oxygen. He’d done studies on this, on the brain’s tendency to create images in those moments before death. Their own shivering seems to have cooled off, though, the more Dax speaks, clutching onto Julian hard. “I understand how hard it must be for you. Not only loving a man, but a Cardassian—the stigma would be difficult to overcome.”

It’s as though someone has pushed a pin into his head and it’s exploded. He is gaping at her, shocked, his breathing speeding up, ragged. “Wh-what! Jadzia. Jadzia! I can assure you, th-that…” His eyes feel like they’ll freeze like this if he keeps them wide any longer, and shuts them. “I do love one person, but it’s not…”

“It’s not me,” Jadzia says, and clutches his hand. She’s staring up at him with the look that has melted him since they first met, and he’s longing for her so much that he barely notices the cold from the pain in his chest.

“It  _is_  you,” he whispers, desperately. “Why would you even  _think_?”

“Who’s the most untrustworthy person on Deep Space 9?” The conversation has seemed to revive them both, and despite the humiliation, Julian can’t stop talking now, desperate to keep their mind off of their very imminent deaths.

“Quark. Obviously.”

“You don’t give him enough credit,” she says, and Julian can feel her smile against his neck. “No one has been more mysterious than that so-called tailor and yet time and time again you go back to him. You eat with him, you discuss philosophy and literature. You’re holding secrets for him, aren’t you?”

The compartment shakes and for a moment, their heads curl towards each other, Jadzia’s face in his shoulder and Julian’s against hers. The floor and walls shake as they feel the ship moving, shifting. The quakes slow down to nothing and both peek up, their heartbeats surging with nerves. However, Julian refuses to give into the fear, and speaks his mind.

“I’m insulted. You think that if Garak ever even said a true thing to me in my life, which he hasn’t, unless it has to do with his distaste of human classics or hemming pants, that I would even be able to tell it was the truth… And that I wouldn’t even tell Captain Sisko?”

“You  _love him_ ,” Jadzia says and Julian feels annoyance start to sting at his eyes. His mouth draws into a thin line. He practically wants to throw her off of him from this interrogation, but he can’t bear to lose her warmth, her scent, especially with the prospect of something terrible so close.

“I don’t. You’re being completely unreasonable. Give me one reasonable explanation that I could possibly be in love with him.” His eyes are stuck shut, not because they’re frozen, but because he refuses to look at her.

“You sleep talk.”

His refusal to look at her ends and his eyes grow wide. “I—that’s not possible.”

“Oh, you do. And your number one favorite topic?”

“When have you heard me sleep talking,  _Lieutenant Commander_?”

“Believe me, if I can get into Odo’s room to move his furniture around, I can catch you, on accident I swear—during the occasional nap. And I admit, you don’t always sleep talk. But when you do…”

“That h-hardly confirms anything.” The walls are cold and gray, and they feel like they’re closing in. Jadzia’s words offer him no comfort. Her body warmth now just feels as if she’s sucking the heat out of him. He misses proper warmth, and thinks of dark red lighting and a habitat thermostat being altered to being just outside of uncomfortable.

“When he talks, you stare at him,” Jadzia says, and her smile is beautiful and sweet, and when Julian forces himself to look down at her, he can only see her hair and the Trill spots disappearing under her uniform, and for the first time, he just listens to what she says. “And when you talk, he stares right back at you. I’ve…I’ve watched him, talk to others. He’s constantly scheming, Julian. Any time the word ‘simple’ comes out of his mouth there’s trouble not far behind. But when I pass you while you eat together…”

“He barely looks away,” Julian says instead. The back of his head thunks heavily against the wall. “He gives me more attention than I deserve, for how often we argue.”

“You know how Cardassians feel about conflict between close friends, Julian.”

Then, there is a second moment. The first moment he knew he would never have Jadzia Dax, and the second moment he suddenly knows why. His fingers tighten reflexively around her. “He’s been courting me.”

“I’d say the courting is mutual,” Jadzia whispers now, and her laugh sounds rough. All this talking has taken up more air and the walls are shaking again.

Julian’s voice turns somewhat desperate, then, head shaking. “No. I’m not courting him. He’s my _friend_ , Jadzia. I love  _you_.” The words don’t feel as good as they should in his mouth. There should be violins and champagne, not the threat of death just a few inches of metal away.

“You do,” she says, sighing as she settles against him, their shivering coming back. “But you love me as a friend, and you know that.”

“It doesn’t…” Julian’s distress bounces around in his head. “I don’t see…”

Then, there is the muffled voice: “ _Lt. Commander Dax! Doctor Bashir! Can you hear us?_ ” And the door began to scrape as three officers pushed it open, and it’s so cold that for a moment everyone outside the door looks gray in the light, and when a strange bubble of hope rises—and pops—in his mind, he finds himself too surprised to move. When they pull Dax off of him, he lets go of her, and then they grab him, as well.

As they make it back to the infirmary, he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. His lips are blue, quickly growing purple in the returning warmth, and he’s sure there’s a gray reflection for a moment, behind his head. There’s nothing there, of course.

The instant Julian Bashir returns to the station, his destination isn’t the infirmary. He’s still so cold, and he just wants to be alone in the suffocating heat of his room, with the habitat controls turned up much hotter than usual. When he stops to open the door, there’s a figure waiting for him in the hallway with his arms crossed, a data PADD pressed against his chest.

“I heard about what happened on the Defiant,” the obvious voice of Garak says as he steps to open to the door. “And I’ve been told to keep you out of the infirmary to get your strength back—ah ah! Now, doctor. After you. I have some very entertaining Cardassian koans that even you might be able to discover an answer to.”

Julian stares at him, and he steps close to him. Garak looks surprised when Julian’s fingers touch Garak’s lips, an intimate gesture that Julian knows the Cardassian  _lets_  happen. His lips are warm and dry, much like the rest of him. “I don’t care if you tell me Shakespeare couldn’t write his way out of a hole,” Julian says, and there’s a strange light in his eyes. “I just want to turn up the heat.”

Garak’s scheming face shows none of its usual planning, and he merely gestures for Bashir to enter with a bemused look on his face. Perhaps the damn Cardassian’s scheme would have to change, now, Bashir thinks, and wonders how well that rough skin would warm his.


End file.
